


Vera

by middlemarch



Category: Testament of Youth (2015)
Genre: Angst, Brothers and Sisters - Freeform, F/M, Love, Memory, Survivors, Veterans' Day
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-12
Updated: 2017-11-12
Packaged: 2019-02-01 03:05:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12695928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: It's as if in the field of flowers, there is only one petal she can see but that is sharply delineated, every vein cut, implacable, eternal.





	Vera

Memory was false. They were never so young, their faces like freshly pressed coins, the pebbles of the road whiter than scoured bone, the grass green, pure, like the bead of honeysuckle nectar at the throat of the flower. She was never so young, so glad at shouting, so bothered by it; she had never ducked her head and not counted the weight of the dark crown of her braids. They had all been the same and she had been apart, remembering how she had been told no when they had been told yes. How they could serve, could learn and she was only to wait.

She would have waited all the days of her life for it to be otherwise. To find herself on that road again, hearing them laugh like gulls. To taste salt on her lips and never think of blood. To hear gulls and never think of screaming. Of a boy’s voice caught in his throat, in his desperate, fading eyes.

Memory was the only truth. She had been young and the world had been young with her, blue and gold. It never would be again. A baby would be put in her arms someday and look in her eyes; her child would learn without words about what was lost. White pebbles, grass waving, poppies that meant pain and forgetting and a relief that was not for everyone. She remembered everything, except what she forgot. His smile, the pulse at his throat she had tasted, how she had shut her eyes and felt him, them, in the darkness she made. How the sun had still shone upon them and she’d known it. 

The sun still shone—consolation, condemnation. At night, she traced a different set of constellations. Roland, Victor, Edward. Vera. 

Vera.

The truth.

**Author's Note:**

> A vignette to observe Veterans' Day in the US.


End file.
